Some wireless networks that are designed to operate in highly congested environments, such as those that operate in the 60 GHz band, may try to reduce inter-device interference by using directional transmissions and receptions between pairs of devices for much of the communications. Once established, in many cases such links may operate without the need for the network controller to schedule every communication. However, this ad hoc scheduling by the various devices in the network can create communications problems of its own. A single device may have separate directional links with multiple other devices, but may not be able to transmit on one link while receiving on another link, and may not be able to receive on one link while focusing its directional receiver on another link. Without a central controller to schedule all communications in a way that prevents these conflicts, interference between devices can easily occur, causing at least some of the communications to fail. Conventional techniques for avoiding interference in a shared medium are not adequate, as these techniques generally only allow for one transmitter in the network at a time. This defeats one of the major advantages of directional links, which is that different links between different device pairs may operate simultaneously without interfering with each other.